Free Pictures at an Exhibition by Sara Houghteling Page A

arched nose, furry brows, and big ears. It was too good.
    Bertrand filched the unopened sugar cube from the side of my saucer and bit into it.
    “Well? News?” he asked.
    I told him about the quarry on Bastille Day, my mother's ring, and the silent car ride.
    The artist smirked. Bertrand said, “Well, then,” and looked away. “You've found such poetry in heartbreak.”
    My eyes must have been brimming. This had an effect on Bertrand.
    “Oh, no, Max,” he said. He jerked his hands around helplessly. “You don't want a woman that stupid.” He pointed a threatening finger at me. “Don't say you do. You choose the wrong women to love. Like Romeo and Rosalind. At the end of the play, his heartsickness over her seems minor. Someday, yours will, too.”
    “I don't read English plays,” I said.
    “If you only love a thing for the chase of it, you don't question if you love the thing itself because you never get close enough to see. You love to yearn, Max, you love to desire. But desire is simpler thanlove. Here's what your mother would tell you if she were able to string more than seven words together that don't involve Brahms: You're a handsome fellow, smart though you don't try, kind to old ladies, and not greedy like your friend Bertrand. Your motives are simple and pure—”
    “Don't treat me like some house pet. I'm leaving,” I said. Bertrand ignored me. I stayed.
    “You love her, so you want to marry her. Therefore you're a good man! Not that there was ever any question of that. I know you're friends with me out of great charity of spirit, since we have nothing in common other than our caste and race and our formidable mothers. So why, Berenzon, in your old age, why would you continually want to waltz yourself into an arrangement in which you can only and continually fail?”
    “I haven't failed,” I said, unsure.
    “No? Well, then, be disappointed.”
    We did not look at each other.
    “This discussion of love is unmanly,” I said.
    Bertrand made a disgusted face and said to no one, “Berenzon is like a brother to you, so you will forgive him when he gets mad at you instead of at the floozy who has stamped on his heart with her pretty foot.” He stood and threw a few coins on our table. Three bright brassy coins, the circles of the saucers, the white cups, the black irises of coffee grounds at their centers, all circles and eyes.
    As I fumbled, I knocked into the art student's table and spilled his coffee onto his sketch pad. It was an accident, though I was not unpleased. His portrait was looking more and more like an anti-Semitic rag. We pantomimed reproach and apology. I tried to give him some money, he acted insulted, and someone muttered about Jews. I looked at Bertrand. Neither of us was in the mood for a fight.
    “Stay out of this,” I said to the speaker, who wore the blue overalls of a street cleaner.
    Outside, Bertrand said, “Really, old man, you think I can't tolerate a picture, a drawing of me as I really am? Hook-nosed and with ears built for flying? I thought it was a good portrait.” He looked into the windows of a building across the street. They faced east, andthe sun winked off them like a lighthouse's warning. “If you hadn't ruined it, I was going to go back there after you left and buy it from him. But I was too embarrassed with you around.”
    I jingled the coins in my pocket.
    “Give me some of those,” he said.
    We stood a few meters from a blind man. He had the words GASSED AT YPRES scrawled on a piece of cardboard and hung by a string around his neck. “You go on,” Bertrand said, moving toward the beggar. “I want to talk to him. Imagine, being blind.” He shook his head in disbelief. I thought my friend might be lying in wait for the street cleaner with the blue overalls. We said good-bye, and I continued along rue de Seine for a way and then turned back.
    My friend squatted on his haunches beside the blind man, who sat on the sidewalk. Bertrand gesticulated with